Archive for July, 2012

Why did Fanny Trollope bother writing a whole book on “Domestic Manners of the Americans”, when she could have summarized the whole thing as “Awful,” and saved herself the trouble? (Never mind, I know why from her son’s autobiography: it kept the whole family fed when they had very little other income.) I must say, […]

Experiment failed. Well, that’s not strictly true – according to the scientific method, the experiment succeeded in disproving my hypothesis. LAB REPORT Hypothesis: one- bag method is more pleasant way to travel in all or almost all cases. Test subject: ten day business trip to Japan. No customer meetings but 15” laptop and reasonably professional […]

Expanded from a comment I made on someone else’s locked LJ post. In the commentary I’ve seen on the shootings in the Aurora, CO theater, some people keep saying things like “Too bad no one else in that theater had a gun, or they could have taken that shooter down.” I keep wondering why everyone […]

Dear Amazon, I do not like the change to the way your Recommendations work. It’s not a New Release until it’s actually been released; that’s what “new release” means. Please quit recommending books that I won’t be able to read for months and months. It was much better before, when you had “new releases” and […]

July 26th, 2012

When I was talking the other day about how timely Trollope’s autobiography still is, I hadn’t even gotten to the section on politics yet. Wow. I can’t agree with him on “the dangers of traveling too quickly” [toward equality], though I would agree that many Liberals are unadmittedly “glad to be accompanied on his way […]

Gravity no longer holds her down and what she’s learning now, she will not reach back to teach us – not as we sit here, anyway. Who knows what learnings lie ahead once we’ve followed her path? But let it not be soon: we have still too much to learn here in lessons already given; […]

I’ve been reading Anthony Trollope’s autobiography, and it keeps surprising me. First it surprises me by how current it is; the job of a writer (and of a reader) hasn’t changed much. WHat he has to say about the craft of writing isn’t far off what Steven King said a decade ago – the difference […]

Actually, we’ve been back since Thursday; fortunately for us we had the rest of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday off before returning to work tomorrow. I’ve already blogged about the cruise, with photos, in two parts; Part I discusses all the places we visited and Part II is about the cruise itself, the ship and […]

Since I decided to take my big suitcase on our cruise after all (I was planning to pack light, but someone pointed out that maybe a cruise isn’t the best time for that) I’ve been tossing in a few extra things I might want: another pair of shorts. A third(!) black dress (dressy one, simple […]

If there’s anyone reading this who knows their Dickens very well, I need a recommendation: if I loved David Copperfield what other Dickens should I read? The only other thing of his that I’ve read through is A Christmas Carol. (I did start Great Expectations a few years ago but somehow didn’t get too far […]